Archive for November, 2006

The Hardest Special Effect to Get Right

Sunday, November 5th, 2006

What do you suppose is the hardest thing to reproduce on the big screen or in a TV show? Is it space scenes? I doubt it. They look pretty good to me for the most part except for the sound and the fact that you can’t really see a laser unless it is hitting something (think laser pointers… all you see is a dot). Is it water? Well, it’s challenging, but it usually looks believable. No, I’d have to say that, based solely on the observation of the final product, it would have to be: the personal computer.

You would think that it wouldn’t be too hard to make a computer look and act like a computer on screen. I don’t know about you, but when I bring up a webpage my computer doesn’t make any high-pitched jittery noises. Almost every show I see has the computer make a weird chirping noise every time the screen’s contents change. I think the sound guy just gets jealous or something that he has nothing to do when the computer screen is the only thing in the frame. He looks at it and thinks, “I could make this part so much cooler with this super high-speed cricket noise every time the screen’s contents change!”

My number two complaint is computer technology that doesn’t exists. The worst offender for this sort of thing is the classic blowing up and “enhancement” of a digital image. It gets blown up, the pixels get huge, and then someone says “let me enhance it” or something similar, and the picture magically becomes so clear that what was a giant 4 inch by 4 inch single colored block turns into a license plate with letters that are an eighth of an inch high and perfectly legible. It just creates this detail data out of nowhere. It makes no sense. It happens at least once in almost every crime show.

When will Hollywood realize that everyone uses computers every day and we can see that the computers in their shows don’t act anything like the computers on our desks. It really makes it hard to stay focused and suspend my disbelief when the computers are such horrible actors.

Never Turn Down Free Money

Sunday, November 5th, 2006

I’ve heard it from many places, and it makes sense. The US government gives away free money for all sorts of things that a lot of people don’t know about. There are a lot of websites out there that charge a fee to search for federal grants and loans. There is one resource that help people find federal grants and loans that doesn’t charge a thing, and that is FederalGrantsWire.com. Give them a try before you start any new project that requires money. You might be surprised when you qualify to have your project funded partially or in full by Uncle Sam!

512 MB of RAM in a Brown Paper Envelope

Thursday, November 2nd, 2006

The final hardware piece of the Dell Latitude c600 puzzle arrived in the mail today. I had started to get the basic parts set up with only 64 MB of RAM, but it just wasn’t enough to do much. Firefox took up so much memory that after 15 minutes of browsing the system was stuck paging memory continuously in and out of the swap partition. This made the whole system utterly unusable and usually resulted in one or more processes crashing with out of memory errors. Today that all changed.

I opened up the mailbox to find a bunch of junk mail and one conspicuously poorly-packed package from the New England area. The homemade envelope was made out of what felt like brown grocery bag paper taped together at the ends. There was a tear in the paper and the green circuit board and some black chips were visible and exposed. I had read a negative comment from one individual who had bought RAM from the same seller I had on eBay. I guess his RAM worked, but he was upset at the packing materials used. There was a no DOA guarantee, so that was good enough for me. I popped open the back of the laptop and installed the new RAM sticks. It booted (which is a good sign) and everything seems to work perfectly!

I left the seller some glowing feedback and am now on my way to learning more about Arch Linux (the more I learn the more I like) and to tweaking this laptop. Browsing the web on this 700 MHz Pentium 3 feels just as fast as it did on the 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 Celeron (Dell Inspiron 1000) that Krissy is now using. This c600 has better support for hibernating, suspending, and sleeping which makes it more portable. It runs cooler, too. It tops out at 55 degrees C under normal circumstances, and I’ve seen it hit 58 degrees C when recompiling Xorg (but only briefly, and when one of the vents was obstructed by my knee). The Pentium 4 Celeron would run at between 52 and 55 degrees C under no load and would sometimes get up around 80 degrees C under heavy load. That makes for quite a toasty lap, let me tell you!

That’s two great deals now that I’ve gotten on eBay in the past two weeks!

PayPerPost Forums: The Place To Be!

Thursday, November 2nd, 2006

Some companies and websites are very secretive about everything they do. Other companies have learned how to keep their users happy, and that’s through communication. PayPerPost has forums where users help each other out. You can discuss your favorite posts and ask questions about how things are run. Sometimes there are big announcements there and hints of things to come before they go live on the main site. I had a question about how some of the rules for posting work and I got three or four replies within just a few hours of posting. I love hanging out on the forums there because the people are nice and helpful and it gives me an insight into the company. Check out the PayPerPost Forums for yourself to see what I mean.


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